With advanced composites increasing replacing traditional metallic materials, the material inhomogeneity and inherent anisotropy of such materials lead to not only new attributes for aerospace structures, but also introduce new technology to damage tolerant design and analysis. The deleterious effects of changes in material properties and initiation and growth of structural damage must be addre...

Self-deployable composite structures are interesting for the space industry as they efficiently use available, lightweight, and have simple deployment systems. Usually, design of these balances two opposing demands: increasing structural stiffness to meet natural frequencies and/or pointing accuracy requirements flexibility enable stowage. However, most perform a single sequence once in orbit. ...

The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Designing a material from the atomic level to achieve a tailored response in extreme conditions is a grand challenge in materials research. Nanostructured metals and composites provide a path to this goal because they contain interfaces that attract, absorb and annihilate point...

Owing to a lack of microstructure, glassy materials are inherently strong but brittle, and often demonstrate extreme sensitivity to flaws. Accordingly, their macroscopic failure is often not initiated by plastic yielding, and almost always terminated by brittle fracture. Unlike conventional brittle glasses, metallic glasses are generally capable of limited plastic yielding by shear-band sliding...

Projected fatigue life analyses are performed to estimate the endurance of a cardiac valve prosthesis under physiological environmental and mechanical conditions. The analyses are conducted using both the classical stress-strain/life and the fracture mechanics-based damage-tolerant approaches, and provide estimates of expected life in terms of initial flaw sizes which may pre-exist in the metal...